ABSTRACT
As a neologism, “biore nery” was probably coined in the early 1990s by Charles A. Abbas of the Archers Daniel Midland Company, Decatur, Illinois, extrapolating the practices implicit in the fractionation of corn and soybean — the wet milling process was an excellent example of a protobiore nery ( gure 1.20). Certainly, by the late 1990s, the word (or, in an occasional variant usage “biomass re nery”) was becoming increasingly popular.1 The concept has carried different meanings according to the user, but the central proposition has been that of a comparison with the petrochemical re nery that produces not only gasoline and other conventional fuels but also petrochemical feedstock compounds for the chemical industry: from a biore nery, on this formal analogy, the fuels would include ethanol, biodiesel, biohydrogen, and/or syngas products, whereas the range of ne chemicals is potentially enormous, re ecting the spectrum of materials that bacterial metabolism can fashion from carbohydrates and other monomers present in plant polysaccharides, proteins, and other macromolecules ( gure 8.1).
